some aces up your sleeve
by betterthanbone
Summary: AU; The one where Erza is a motivational speaker and Jellal isn't buying any of her shit.


"With friends, you can accomplish anything!" She finishes with a grand gesture, and the crowd sitting before her rises from their seats and proceeds to shower her with a standing ovation. Jellal feels obligated to do so as well and he stands with a mocking rendition of a long-suffering sigh. He can hear his joints popping and cricks working their way up his back as he claps, languid pulsing beats, weary and tired as he reluctantly imitates the others, with their bright eyes and the wide grins spanning their faces. He twirls the pen around his fingers with the soft sleight of his hand. The cap is still stuck on it's end and it is dripping with unused ink, practically screaming for him to use it, but even when the lecture ends, the circumcised lines running across the pages are still clean, except for several phrases and a series of rather angry crossing-outs. "Friendship is important" is among one of them written in his slovenly handwriting and he has to squint to decipher the word, but it is definitely there. Bullshit, he sings in his head, dragging the vowels out.

"It's time for the question and answer segment!" She points toward a man within the crowd. He stands, so that his tousled pink hair is within everyone's sight. "You. What is your question?"

"What is genuphobia?" He asks, eagerly awaiting his response as the speaker fumbles for one.

"I don't see how this is related but it's an irrational fear of knees.." Her reply is laced with hesitation and a light sheen of annoyance that there was a high chance he didn't listen to her lecture at all.

However, the guy looks satisfied with his answer and thanks her with a brief nod and promptly sits back in his seat. Beside him, a blonde girl slaps him on the head without abandon and from furrowed eyebrows and her castigating glare, he can tell that she's scolding him for his irrelevance.

"You!" The speaker recovers from the earlier bizarre ordeal, albeit a little shaken. This time, she points to a man - finally with a normal hair colour for a change, black, - and he rises along with her finger. She worries her lip between her teeth and he realises that she's hoping for a much more sane question.

"I have a stripping problem and I have an irrational compulsion to be naked at random times. One time I did it in a business meeting and then I got fired. So, uh, advice?" The guy shifts uncomfortably on his feet.

She hesitates on this one before giving an answer. "..There's no reason to change the past because only due to it we are who we are now."

The guy mutters a curt thanks and gives a non-committal shrug, causing the large chain slung around his neck to oscillate in aimless circles before returning to his seat, looking quite relieved to not be in the center of attention.

"Last question," she announces, looking genuinely disconcerted from her sociopathic crowd. He really shouldn't have listened to Ultear when she shoved the newspaper in her face during breakfast and pointed at an ad with the words, "Lecture For Human Disasters" splayed across the surface in big, bold letters. Jellal sighs and wishes for this to be over. This time, the speaker's finger lands on him. "You."

A sea of heads turn to him and suddenly he feels attacked. The speaker looks at him with expectant eyes all the way from the stage as she wrings her hands, again hoping for a sane person this time. But if she wanted someone sane, why did she choose a guy with blue hair and a red tattoo running down the side of his face?

A few beats pass and she starts to get impatient, quirking an eyebrow at him and he swears he can almost hear her think, _Ah, I chose wrongly again. _Everyone's eyes turn on him and he suppresses a resigned sigh as he rises. Now, a question. He didn't really listen to the lecture, and he has absolutely zero interest in friendship or cryptic answers. He can try to play dumb like the guy with the pink hair, but if one of the people sitting among this crowd could be his future boss, he wasn't going to risk his reputation. The words scrawled across his notebook seem abstract to him. Friendship is important, live for your friends, confide in your friends, friends, friends, friends, friends.

He decides to say something smart about friends. "Uh, I... want to - like, uh, protect.. my... friends?" He supplies sagely.

A void of silence hangs over the crowd like a dark shroud until the pink-haired guy breaks the quiet and says cheerfully, loud enough for everyone in the entire room to hear. "Hey, Lucy, mine wasn't the worst!" The blonde girl - Lucy, apparently - swiftly clamps a hand over his mouth and mutters expletives into his ear. Jellal can make out, _Natsu, shut up, read the situation!_ A bright red flush situates itself on her cheekbones throughout the entire ordeal. Natsu looks unfazed and continues to wait for the speaker's response.

Finally, for the first time in the question and answer segment, she looks relieved and pleased at his question, Jellal realises with a surprised jolt. "Yes, you're not the only one. All I need is the power to be able to protect my comrades. So long as I have the strength to do that, I don't care if I'm weaker than everyone else in the world."

"Ah!" He exclaims revelatory, as if he has just experienced an epiphany, while trying to sound enthusiastic about her response, and slumps back into his seat with his eyes pivoted to the ground and heated cheeks with zero interest in friendship and a complete desire to return home.

"Well, I guess that's it for today's lecture! Remember - you don't die for your friends. You live for them!" Once again, the room erupts into a thunderous applause and people begin to stream out the door. He hops up from his seat and tries to jostle his way through the crowd out of the building.

Screw friendship, he adds in his head. He was going to go home and eat cold cereal while staring at a blank wall. He's a human disaster, and even after the lecture for human disasters, he still is one.

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><p><em>hey! i tried to fit erza's quotes from the anime into her answers and im not sure if the thing i wrote made any sense.. if you have any concerns or issues you'd like to address please leave a comment or message me. sorry for any bad grammar or typos please inform me if u see any mistakes. thanks for reading! the next chapter will be in a few. <em>


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